Many retail service providers, such as mobile operators, MVNOs, and cable broadband providers, rely heavily on wholesale carriers to transport and terminate their customers’ international calls.
Wholesale carriers terminated approximately 327 billion minutes of traffic in 2018, down 3% from 2017. While wholesale traffic declined in 2018, over the last 10 years it has seen a compounded annual growth rate of 3%.
Until 2015, international carrier voice traffic had increased in each of the previous 60 years.
But for the past four years, paid call volumes have slumped with no end in sight. International carriers had already suffered from revenue stagnation due to slow traffic growth and falling prices. The unprecedented occasion of outright traffic decline, however, marked a new and depressing turning point.
The international voice market doesn't bring a lot of joy these days. (For that, may I suggest adopting a puppy?)
As we've written before, 2015 marked a turning point in the international voice market. It was the first time since the Great Depression that international call traffic declined, even if only by one half percent.
And it's been downhill ever since, as the slump in voice traffic has turned into a fact of life. Carriers’ traffic fell a further 9% in 2017 and then another 4% in 2018, to a total of 465 billion minutes.
As a TeleGeography reader, it’s likely that you’ve seen the name i3forum before.
This unique consortium is bringing together carriers to take on industry-wide challenges. IoT? PBX Security? NFV? They’ve thought about how all of these topics are impacting the modern carrier.
A Senior Vice President at Tata Communications and i3forum Vice Chair Christian Michaud kindly took the time to give us an inside look at the way i3forum does business and what new challenges are on the horizon.
Last week we dropped our annual State of the Network e-book. This free resource marries the top findings from four of our most popular research services into one handy guide.
If you haven't had a chance to peruse the new edition, we thought we'd whet your appetite with a few interesting tidbits from this year's findings.
It's true that 2015 marked a turning point in the international voice market—the first time since the Great Depression that international call traffic declined. However, that slump in voice traffic has turned into a rout, as carriers’ traffic fell a further 8.4 percent in 2017 to 484 billion minutes.
Copyright © 2023 TeleGeography.
